1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical diagnosis system for use in diagnosis and evaluation in medical treatments and medical examinations.
2. Prior Art
Recently a medical checkup such as a health screening including various kinds of tests such as blood analysis, urine analysis, electrocardiography, X-ray examination, etc. is conducted on a regular basis. Because a number of people usually take several medical tests at a time in a regular medical checkup, doctors have a heavy workload.
For example, a doctor follows procedures comprising the steps of (1) dividing a large number of test results into sets of data for individuals, (2) spreading papers of the test results on a desk to check them, (3) finding out possible problems based on abnormal symptoms in the test results, (4) checking and analyzing all the results of test items relating to such possible problems, (5) preparing diagnostic comments based on his analysis, and (6) adding handwritten diagnostic comments to an examination report. This method called "overall evaluation method" makes a doctor spend more than 10 minutes in average to analyze the medical examination results for each individual.
In addition, this method involves other problems; for example, overall evaluations are not always the same for all doctors analyzing the same data. Also, a doctor does not always give the same overall evaluation based on the same data.
In many medical institutions where regular medical checkups are conducted, computers are utilized for printing the results of diagnosis and overall evaluation on a sheet form called an examination report. However, since the content printed out by a computer is in many cases limited to numerical values and simple doctor's comments, it is rather difficult for a patient or a client to well understand the printed results. When more detailed comments are further required, handwritten comments are usually added to a printed examination report by a doctor. In this case, since handwritten comments are added mostly in a short period of time, they are sometimes illegible and insufficient.
Under these circumstances, attempts have recently been made to introduce a medical diagnosis system employing an expert system technology in order to ease the doctor's workload. In such an expert system, the know-how of experts is introduced into a computer program and various procedures, mainly diagnostic determination, are conducted by the computer. Specifically, an expert system is composed of preparing groups of complex conditions and describing them by a program language. This kind of a medical diagnosis system provides both medical institutions and patients or clients with benefits such as improved accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis and medical examination.
However, since medical data obtained by doctor's consultation, physical examination and testing in medical care have wide varieties in their forms, descriptions and units, complex computer processing procedures are required to process each of the medical data which taking into consideration the contents of the data. Therefore, large numbers of processes are needed to develop such a program mainly composed of condition groups, and a computer must process a large amount of data during the execution of the program. Thus, a medical diagnosis system has not been achieved unless using a large-scaled computer system of an office computer level or higher due to its development cost and processing capacity.
Under these circumstances, various other medical diagnosis systems have been proposed. For example, JP-A-1-163873 discloses a diagnosis-assisting system providing a diagnostic information on sickness or disorder by comparing input information about patient's symptoms with the content of a rule-type database comprising a cluster of rules described by the phrase of "If . . . , then . . . " and used in the same category, wherein the system includes a means for limiting the candidates of the patient's sickness or disorder to fewer numbers by comparing input data of patient's symptoms with the content of a frame-type database according to the rules of the rule-type database; a sickness or disorder-identifying means for presuming the patient's sickness or disorder by inquiring the symptoms of the limited candidates of sickness or disorder and storing in memory the names of the more limited sickness or disorder and presumption processes; and a means for displaying the names of the sickness or disorder and the presumption processes in a predetermined order as well as information on the identified sickness or disorder. However, this reference does not disclose the details of the system and the steps of limiting the candidates of sickness or disorder seems rather complicated.
Further, JP-A-2-55032 discloses a diagnosis system using data obtained by examining a patient, wherein the system comprises a means for calculating a disease mode index by nonlinearly transforming plural data, multiplying each transformed value by a predetermined coefficient and adding the resultant products, a knowledge base for presuming the extent of sickness or disorder, and a means for presuming the extent of sickness or disorder by using the disease mode index determined by the above disease mode index-calculating means and the knowledge retrieved from the knowledge base. For example, a disease mode index (DMI) of diabetes is obtained by non-linearly transforming the measured blood sugar levels (at fasting, after 1 hour, after 2 hours) into the ratings S.sub.n and calculating the following formula: EQU DMI=W.sub.1 .times.S.sub.1 (at fasting)+W.sub.2 .times.S.sub.2 (1 h)+W.sub.3 .times.S.sub.3 (2 h),
wherein W.sub.1 =0.4 (weight coefficient at fasting), W.sub.2 =0.25 (weight coefficient after 1 hour) and W.sub.3 =0.35 (weight coefficient after 2 hours). However, this system is effective only in diagnosis of limited sickness or disorder, and the formula of DMI would be quite complicated in the case of conducting diagnosis for a wide range of possible sickness or disorder as in a regular medical checkup.